Seagate drives fail along their own lines. A firmware fault that makes a perfectly healthy disk vanish from the BIOS. A shingled BarraCuda quietly rewriting itself after a format. A Backup Plus whose bridge has died with an ordinary SATA disk sitting behind it. This page covers the ranges, the faults that belong to each, and what can honestly be done. Any single drive is £300 + VAT after a free diagnostic.
One Seagate drive is £300 + VAT and the diagnostic before it is free. That covers a BarraCuda out of a desktop, a FireCuda, a single IronWolf or an external Backup Plus. Recorder disks are £400 + VAT and a full NAS or RAID set starts at £500 + VAT.
Seagate builds everything from the BarraCuda in a family desktop to the Exos disks in a rack, and the fault patterns are consistent enough to be worth listing. The one worth reading twice is the second, because it is the fault most often mistaken for a drive that has died.
The disk spins, it sounds entirely normal, and the machine behaves as though nothing is connected. On a Seagate that points at the service area rather than at the platters more often than it does on any other make. It is a real fault and a repairable one, and it does not mean a single file has been lost.
A drive reporting zero bytes, a fraction of its real size, or a model string full of nonsense is describing a firmware problem, not a mechanical one. The recording surfaces are usually untouched. This is the fault that gets drives thrown away by people who were told they were dead, and it is routine work on the right equipment.
Heads that can no longer find their position, generally after a knock or after years of wear. Every power-up from this point costs surface. Switch it off, leave it off, and resist the advice about freezers and gentle taps, both of which turn a recoverable disk into a scrapped one.
The standard ending for a Backup Plus or an Expansion that was unplugged during a copy. The partition or the file table has been damaged and Windows is offering the one action guaranteed to make it worse. Decline it, unplug the drive, and leave the repair tools alone.
A cycle of start, click, silence, start again. On a desktop unit that is very often the power stage or the controller board rather than the mechanism, and on a portable it can be either. Nothing is diagnosed by listening to it through a wall, which is what the free assessment is for.
A copy that runs at full speed and then collapses to a few megabytes a minute is either finding sectors it cannot read cleanly, or is a shingled consumer drive that has filled its staging area and is rewriting bands in the background. Both need imaging hardware rather than a file manager and a hopeful afternoon.
This is the single biggest difference between the two large manufacturers and it is worth understanding before anyone starts taking things apart. A Backup Plus, an Expansion or a One Touch is generally an ordinary SATA disk with a small USB adapter board in front of it, and that board does no encryption. Take the disk out, connect it to a SATA port, and in the normal run of things it mounts and shows you your files. Do the same to a Western Digital My Passport and you get static, because the encryption on those runs in the electronics you just discarded. That contrast is set out at length on the Western Digital page.
Three caveats sit on top of that. Seagate does sell external models designed around a password, and those units encrypt in hardware exactly as a Passport does, so a bare disk out of one behaves the same unreadable way. If the drive asked for a password when you plugged it in, it is one of those. Second, a shucked drive occasionally sits dead in a desktop machine because of the third pin on the SATA power connector, a reset line that enclosures never used and some supplies hold high; external drive recovery covers that trap and the fix for it. Third, and most important, none of this is a reason to open a failing drive at home. A disk that mounts is a disk being written to.
Even where the bridge does nothing clever, the board carries the model, the revision and occasionally a firmware quirk that matters when the disk is put on the imager. Send the unit whole. If it has already been opened, put the shell and the board in the box with the drive. Nothing has been ruined by opening it — the harm comes from what happens next, which is usually a well-meant attempt to copy files off a drive that should have been imaged first.
LaCie has belonged to Seagate for over a decade, and lifting the aluminium off a Rugged or a d2 generally reveals a Seagate mechanism inside. That range has its own page on this site, covering the beeping, the orange bumper and the desktop units, at LaCie recovery. Seagate also absorbed Samsung's hard disk business years ago, so a spinning Samsung SpinPoint is handled here as a Seagate; Samsung's solid state drives are an entirely separate product line and are nothing to do with it.
Seagate names its families rather than colour-coding them, and the name tells you a good deal about how the drive has been living. A disk that has spent five years writing video streams has worn differently from one that held a games library, and the recovery follows that difference.
The mainstream desktop and laptop line, and the drive most often posted in. The important detail is that a good many consumer BarraCudas are shingled, including the widely sold 2TB models in both sizes. That makes them slow to image and it means a format has a clock running against it rather than sitting harmlessly until overwritten.
Two quite different products under one name. The older hybrids pair spinning platters with a small flash cache on the drive's own board, so the flash is not a separate device that can be read on its own and recent writes may still be sitting in it when the board fails. The newer FireCuda blades are NVMe solid state drives and are worked on the flash bench instead.
NAS duty: conventional recording, vibration sensors, and built to run continuously in a box full of its own kind. They arrive here either singly at £300 + VAT, or as a complete set out of a Synology or QNAP that has dropped a volume, in which case it is an array rebuild from £500 + VAT priced on the number of disks.
The surveillance line, written to constantly by DVR and NVR recorders and tuned to keep streaming rather than stop to think about a bad sector. They wear out rather than break. A disk lifted from a recorder is priced in the £400 + VAT recorder band, and recorder work is one of the stated exclusions from no fix, no fee.
Rackmount capacity, in servers and storage shelves, often SAS rather than SATA and almost always one member of a larger set. Where the whole set arrives the job is a RAID rebuild rather than a single-drive read, and the first thing needed is the order the disks sat in and what the controller was doing when it stopped.
Worth naming because people still ask. A generation of desktop drives shipped with firmware that could drop the disk into a busy state and make it vanish from the BIOS with every platter intact. That specific episode is long past, but the lesson stands: on a Seagate, invisible does not mean finished.
Every hard disk keeps a private area you never see, in which it stores the things it needs to be itself: the translator that converts the addresses a computer asks for into physical positions on the platters, the growing list of sectors it has decided not to use, the tuning figures for each head, and its own model and capacity. Corrupt any of that and the drive does not report a problem, because the part that would report it is the part that has gone. It simply stops answering, or answers with nonsense. To the person at the desk that is indistinguishable from a drive that has died, and it is the reason so many Seagates are written off while entirely intact.
Reading one is a matter of talking to the disk on its own terminal rather than through the operating system, rebuilding or bypassing the damaged structures, and then imaging the surfaces normally. It is one of the more satisfying jobs on the bench because nothing is physically wrong: no clean-air work, no donor mechanism, no risk to the platters, and the whole of the data typically comes back. It also sits inside no fix, no fee, since it is not an electronic or mechanical failure. A drive that has been through several rounds of a repair utility beforehand is a harder proposition, because those tools write.
The other Seagate classic is a dead controller board, usually after a surge down a tired mains supply or the wrong adaptor on an external. The board can be replaced, but not by ordering an identical one and bolting it on, which is what a depressing number of drives have had done to them before they arrive. Each board is paired to its own disk by calibration data unique to that mechanism, and that data has to travel with it. On some families it lives in a small separate chip that can be moved across by hand; on others it sits inside the main controller itself, which makes a straight swap useless and the job considerably more involved. Board and chip level work is one of the named exclusions from the guarantee, so it takes 50% upfront.
Shingled recording overlaps each track with the next to fit more onto a platter. It is a sound trade when a drive is mostly being read, and an awkward one when it is being rewritten, because changing anything in the middle of a band means rewriting the whole band. Consumer BarraCudas have used it for years, in both the 3.5-inch and the 2.5-inch ranges, and two things follow for anyone who has just lost files.
The first is time. Imaging one is slow and cannot be rushed, so a 2TB shingled disk may take a day and a half where a conventional one takes an afternoon, and that is with everything working. The second matters more. After a delete or a format, the drive treats those bands as free and may rewrite them during its own background housekeeping, which destroys the old content rather than simply unlinking it. On a conventional drive, deleted data waits patiently to be recovered. On a shingled one it is being actively eroded while the drive sits powered on doing apparently nothing. If a BarraCuda has just been formatted by mistake, switching it off within the hour is worth more than anything else you can do. Formatted drive recovery goes through what a quick format does and does not leave behind.
The drive is booked in, put on imaging hardware that can set its own timeouts and skip a difficult region rather than hammering it, and assessed head by head where necessary. That report closes two working days after arrival and it says three things: what has actually failed, how much of the disk is realistically readable, and what it will cost. The figure is fixed, it is in writing, and it does not change afterwards. If the report says the job is not worth doing, it says so, and that costs you nothing but the postage in.
Logical faults are worked entirely on a copy, so your drive is read and never written to. Mechanical faults are opened under filtered air, given a matched head stack from stock racked by model and firmware family, and asked for one supervised pass before being retired. Firmware faults are dealt with through the drive's service area with no need to open it at all. Whatever the route, recovered files come back on fresh media and the original is returned or destroyed securely, exactly as you instruct in writing.
Several Seagate lines are sold with the manufacturer's own recovery plan attached for a set number of years, including IronWolf Pro, the FireCuda range and certain external models. If your drive is still inside that window and the plan was registered, use it: it has already been paid for as part of the purchase price. It is worth ten minutes with the paperwork or the original order confirmation before ringing anybody, this laboratory included. Where the plan has expired, was never registered, or the drive is not one of the covered models, the ordinary bands below apply.
Overwritten data is gone. A full format, a reinstall onto the same volume, or weeks of continued use after the files disappeared all write over the very space being searched, and nothing reaches underneath that. A shingled BarraCuda formatted a month ago and left running has been quietly rewriting itself ever since. A drive that has been opened outside a clean-air environment has usually collected the dust that ends it. And on the FireCuda NVMe blades and other solid state products, deleted files on a healthy drive are normally unrecoverable, because the controller erases freed blocks on its own initiative within minutes; SSD recovery sets out where the line falls.
A single Seagate hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, NVMe included, and an external such as a Backup Plus or an Expansion is a single drive for pricing. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. Anything with more than one disk in it — a NAS full of IronWolf, a RAID set of Exos — starts at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count. A SkyHawk or any other disk out of a CCTV recorder is £400 + VAT. No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs, which is why board work and head replacement take 50% of the quoted figure upfront. Finished single-drive jobs typically run 2 to 4 working days once the quote is approved.
Getting it here is the easy part. Guildford Business Park is 18 miles away, a 40 minute drive on the A322 and then the A3, and the reception desk there signs devices in Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm if you would rather hand it over than post it. Most drives arrive as tracked parcels instead, from the offices along the M4 corridor between Reading and Slough, from Wokingham, Camberley and Ascot, and from a good deal further afield, since a boxed disk posts perfectly well from anywhere in the country. If the badge on yours is a WD rather than a Seagate, the Western Digital page covers what changes, hard drive recovery handles every other make, and the price list publishes all five bands with VAT shown as its own line.
More Seagates arrive here with firmware faults than with broken mechanisms, and those give back everything. Switch it off and let the free diagnostic tell you which you have.
Branded drives reach this bench in the post far more often than they are carried in. A padded parcel is steadier than a rucksack on the A322, it is covered for its value while it travels, and a drive handed across a post office counter in Bracknell on the Tuesday afternoon is normally logged in at Guildford on the Wednesday.
An external goes in its own case. An internal comes out of the machine first. Those two rules pull in opposite directions and both matter. A My Passport, a My Book, a Backup Plus or an Expansion should arrive complete, screws and all, because the electronics in the shell may hold the only copy of the encryption key. A disk bolted into a tower, a laptop, an iMac, a NAS chassis or a recorder should arrive bare, since nothing is dismantled at this end. Any repair shop will free one in a few minutes. Storage soldered flat to a mainboard is the exception with no answer: if it will not come out, there is nothing to post.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Guildford Data Recovery. From Bracknell the drive is about 18 miles and 40 minutes away down the A322 and the A3 if you would rather deliver it yourself. Whichever route it takes, the telephone call confirming arrival comes the same day, and two working days later the free diagnostic is finished and you have a figure.
Unsure whether yours is the sort that travels in its case? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape the box, or run the free online diagnostic and answer four questions instead.